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Branagh's Hard-up Hamlet

Photo by David Appleby

Theater of the Absurd: Jennifer Saunders (left) and Joan Collins in "A Midwinter's Tale"

Behind-the-curtains comedy takes a dive in Kenneth Branagh's 'A Midwinter's Tale'

By Richard von Busack

I count myself among the few who still like Kenneth Branagh even if he isn't married to Emma Thompson anymore. Still, I couldn't fall for his A Midwinter's Tale. It is the story of an actor, Joe Harper (Michael Maloney), torn between his god (Shakespeare) and Mammon. Offered by his agent (Joan Collins) a part in a lucrative Yank science-fiction movie trilogy, Harper decides instead to stage Hamlet during the height of Christmas season theatrics in England, when he's assured of having to scrape the bottom of the barrel for talent.

Maloney has a wild gaze like Gene Wilder in his prime but nothing really to fix that stare upon. Among the cast of has-beens and never-weres are John Sessions as a cross-dressing Queen Gertrude (haw, a guy dressed as a woman!); Julia Sawalha as an Ophelia with 20-400 vision; and Celia Imrie as an androgynous, art-damaged set designer named Fadge. If the rest of the cast had been wound as tight as Imrie, the mild jokes might have some impact. The essence of comedy is surprise, and A Midwinter's Tale is a surprise-free movie, starting with its familiar premise that actors are a raunchy, selfish, querulous lot. Their rehabilitation into a troupe of crowd-pleasers, however, is a species of surprise: a grim one. Don't they realize that we have to import British comedy because ours is insufficiently mean?

The lone highlight is a quick cameo by a very mean comedian, the Absolutely Fabulous Jennifer Saunders, here with a Dallas accent that's every bit as horrifying as the Chelsea whine she used to emit on TV. How does she immobilize her upper lip like that? Superglue? Novocain? And what genuine comic inspiration to realize that the fanatically self-centered person never really looks at any one else. P.S.: The inside joke about the new Loncraine/McKellan Richard III reminds me to remind you to go see that movie instead for real Shakespearean laughs.

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A Midwinter's Tale (R; 120 min.), directed and written by Kenneth Branagh, photographed by Roger Lanser and starring Michael Maloney, John Sessions and Celia Imrie.


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